Replies to post #273072 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[PegnVA]

"REASONABLE" REPUBLICANS ARE BETRAYING US, TOO
By Catherine Rampell, Opinion writer September 25 at 7:55 PM

President Trump clearly has no clue what’s happening on health care, taxes or really any other major policy front. He has also made abundantly clear that he has no interest in getting up to speed.

Unfortunately, Trump’s unseriousness has become so grotesque, so all-consuming, that it has distracted us from dozens of other dilettantes and demagogues in Washington — far too many of them other members of Trump’s own political party.

Trump may be a toddler, we keep telling ourselves, but at least some (comparative) grown-ups on Capitol Hill are thinking things through. Maybe we don’t agree with them all the time; maybe they have a different vision for the role of government than many of us do. Still, at least a few thoughtful, moderate, principled, solutions-oriented people in the legislature are working to offset the White House’s abdication of policy leadership.

The flaming turd that is Cassidy-Graham should disabuse us all of that notion.

What’s been threatening the health-care coverage of tens of millions of Americans isn’t Trump. It’s the entire Republican Party.

This garbage bill, currently looking dead but with a few days left to revive itself, should teach us two things: Republicans don’t care about process, and they don’t care about policy. You could be forgiven for also concluding, as they’ve increasingly suggested this week, that they don’t care about regular Americans, either.

For years we’ve been told that the original sin of the Affordable Care Act was that it was procedurally flawed. It was passed in the dead of night, constructed in smoke-filled backrooms and only passed thanks to partisan budget gimmicks.

These critiques were mostly nonsense, of course.

Obamacare went through a painfully slow, year-long process. It was considered at lots and lots of hearings. It received multiple assessments from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and attracted a supermajority of Senate votes.

Contrary to popular misconception, the bill was not even passed using the budget reconciliation process.

All of these attacks may not be true of Obamacare’s passage — but they do apply to Republicans’ attempts to repeal it.

Republican senators gave themselves a few days, and just one cobbled-together finance committee hearing, to pass a bill along party lines with no full CBO budget score. In the absence of any independent assessment of what their proposal does, they made up numbers that ignore big chunks of the bill.

The proposal is opposed by nearly every conceivable stakeholder, from doctors to insurers to pharmaceutical companies to patient advocates. Not only because the process is being rushed, but also because what’s actually in the bill is so terrible.

On major questions of policy, legislators punted to the states, giving them two years to build new health-care systems from scratch — even though state legislators have little expertise in the matter and few of the resources available to Congress.

This alone would be sure to destabilize insurance markets. Now layer on severe funding cuts, ultimately punishing every state; the removal of the individual mandate, which makes sure risk pools aren’t dominated by the most expensive patients; and the unwinding of federal regulations designed to protect those with preexisting conditions and to make sure the insurance plans that consumers buy actually cover anything.

Chaos, premium spikes for the sick and the poor, and the hemorrhaging of tens of millions of Americans from insurance rolls are all foreseeable consequences. In other words: It’s what happens when an entire party decides to abandon policy experts.

Note that it’s not just the usual tea party crazies pushing for this monstrosity. It’s many supposedly reasonable Republicans, too. These include Republicans such as Sens. Jeff Flake (Ariz.) and Ben Sasse (Neb.), upon whom we’ve heaped loads of praise for their principles and backbone.

Even Sen . Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), who helped kill the Senate bill the last go-around, has at this point said merely that she has reservations about the legislation. Given how this bill was constructed and what it contains, anything other than a flat-out rejection gives the lie to her “reasonableness.”

If even late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel, who has made a career out of playing an average Joe, can figure out how vulnerable this legislation leaves millions of unlucky Americans, surely senators can spot the problems, too.

We knew we can’t trust Trump to craft careful policy that puts regular Americans’ needs above his own. Judging from this debacle, it looks like we can’t trust the rest of his party to do so, either.
-WASH POST, September 25, 2017

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/reasonable-republicans-are-betraying-us-too/2017/09/25/47eedd88-a22d-11e7-b14f-f41773cd5a14_story.html?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na&utm_term=.a6880b5cc26a

[BOREALIS]

Bernie Sanders Calls Graham-Cassidy Health Care Bill A ‘Disaster’ Right To Their Faces

By Sean Colarossi on Mon, Sep 25th, 2017 at 9:31 pm

"Every major health organization in this country ... thinks that their proposal is a disaster," Sanders said, standing right next to Sens. Graham and Cassidy.

http://15130-presscdn-0-89.pagely.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Screen-Shot-2017-09-25-at-9.12.25-PM-701x413.png

In Monday night’s debate on the all-but-dead Graham-Cassidy healthcare plan, Bernie Sanders called the Republican plan a “disaster” – and he did it while standing right next to Sens. Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy.

Sanders correctly told his Republican colleagues that “every major health organization” in America opposes their inhumane bill.

Video:

Bernie Sanders Calls Graham-Cassidy Healthcare Plan ‘Disaster’ Right To Their Faces #HealthCareDebate pic.twitter.com/ErtPWdcADO
https://twitter.com/SeanColarossi/status/912488308588113920/video/1
— Sean Colarossi (@SeanColarossi) September 26, 2017

Sanders said:

Every major health organization in this country, whether it is the American Medical Association, the American Hospital Association, American Cancer Society, the Alzheimers Society – every single major medical organization in this country – thinks that their proposal is a disaster. So our job now is to defeat this disastrous proposal, get back to the drawing board, see if we can work together for some short-term fixes. Long term, in my view, I speak only for myself, this country has to join the rest of the industrialized world, guarantee health care as a right of all people.

Despite the fact that the Graham-Cassidy plan is essentially dead, as Maine Sen. Susan Collins came out against it today, Sens. Graham and Cassidy are still working at this late hour to save it.

But, as Sanders said in Monday’s debate – right to their faces – it is a “disastrous” plan that would hurt millions of people. Everybody with a casual understanding of America’s health care system agrees with the Vermont senator.

With another piece of GOP repeal legislation being hurled into the scrapheap of history, the only way forward is to finally stop the GOP effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act, improve the law’s shortcomings, and continue working to create a system in which every man, woman and child has access to affordable and comprehensive coverage.

http://www.politicususa.com/2017/09/25/bernie-sanders-calls-graham-cassidy-healthcare-plan-disaster-faces.html